My dad took a unique photograph of an area of Mitchell Park, Palo Alto, California, in, I’m guessing, 1967. The view is of the Tiny Tots playground, at 37.4230 N, -122.1164 W. The playground, judging from a recent Google satellite image, is now vastly changed; who knows whether that’s for the worse or better.
He took the photo using a camera that he designed and built himself. The view spans more than 360 degrees (more like 430 degrees), and it’s in color, which was a photographic technology that was being slowly adopted at that time. And the photo and its camera were purely DIY products, if you don’t count the commercially obtained raw film and developing chemicals.
Both the contents of the image and the technology used to make the image are historically interesting. Click on the “PDF” links below. You can then zoom in on the photo and view its details. The file on the left presents an unannotated image; the one on the right, an annotated version; both are accompanied by explanatory text.
I don’t recall which, among his several DIY cameras, that my dad used to create the particular image shown above. He captured many such 360-degree-plus images and built at least three homemade cameras for capturing them. Recall that back in the day, before digital photography, a camera was used to record an image on a negative, and then, an enlarger was used to shine light through the negative onto print paper to produce a final print. My dad did both. Two of his panoramic cameras, shown below, I found among the things he left behind after his sudden death from an accidental fall, in February 2017.
I recall neither of the cameras shown above. But I do recall, from my childhood, all of the following:
There was a third such camera, undoubtedly the first, which was bulky and resembled a multifaceted, geometrically sided loaf of bread. My dad constructed all of his panoramic cameras in his garage workshop, after family dinners, which tended to irk my mother. His tinkering over the years tended to yield progressively smaller, more-sophisticated versions of his original design. His capturing of images involved the camera sitting on a tripod and rotating around a vertical axis. Inside, a battery-driven motor both rotated the camera and pulled the film from one roller to the other so that a certain length of film was exposed to the image from the lens in a calibrated rotational sequence. One version of his camera had a remote control, and my dad was thus able to stand away from the camera and appear in his own photographs. He insisted that he had not invented this panoramic photographic technology, and he expressed disinterest in obtaining any patents or profits from his device: he just enjoyed photographic technology and the making of photos.